


I Will Build You A House Outside of Heaven

by GoldenSenecio



Category: Ghost (Sweden Band)
Genre: F/M, and a very long love story, car crashes, crushed bread, hospital rooms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 00:33:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16566167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenSenecio/pseuds/GoldenSenecio
Summary: so we can make fun of all of God's angels.Nihil, coming to visit Imperator in the hospital, walks backwards through his loves. A car crash, a dozens of promises, a dozen more compromises, a traveler case of make up, a thousand bars and venues that blend together. A girl that's always been leaving, and a man whose been looking for the perfect place to stay."Come on, good sir," She says "Don't you want to dance?"





	I Will Build You A House Outside of Heaven

The strange thing about being so involved with the church, leading the castle over the cobblestones of man, is that you forget how fragile you really are. Nihil knows this, the pain of rebirth, of breaking the body to make something so much more than a body could be, but forgets the moments between burial and resurrection.

This is not the first time either of them has gotten hurt. Starting from scraps as children to walking gingerly across the bruised earth- you don't forget your first exorcism after all. But the hospital is much brighter and colder than he expected, and asks a surprised nurse if she could dim the lights, pushing through the locked security doors with ease. The ghouls follow briskly. There is no jingle of her cars keys with every step.

Their first car crash after getting together was quite major. It was right outside their favorite enclave, a tiny bakery that made a uniquely dense shortbread, right before the intersection. They had found it together during a weekly excursion to gather mundane items for the church, which was still trying to build its own castle on a hill, and kept it as a meet up point. You go get the mail, I'll get the pounds of salt. Come back and get some short bread before the light's start to go down.

Their car, a slick black corvette, was stricken by a drunk driver who veered too far into the opposite lane after a deep right turn. The culprits vehicle, a Ford truck with a color Nihil can't remember anymore, collided with the backseat. narrowly missing the gas line as the metal bent into a short L. Nihil, still young but already cultivating some delicate grey hairs, was pinned between the driver's side door and the center counsel.

The face in the rear-view mirror was unrecognizable to him, but the blood running down his forehead was. Imperator, awkwardly clung to the dash board, was a sudden presence in Nihil's vision. Holding her black cardigan against the wound, pressed her nose and forehead against the clean slide of his face. The sirens felt ages away, from what Nihil could realize, but they were approaching from the front. A gas station attendant watching the scene from across the street had called it in.

 

"Just breathe my love," Imperator hushed into the cheekbone she fit perfectly into. Like a puzzle piece, he wanted to tell her. "They're coming. You're fine, You're fine."

 

The cardigan was a gift, he thought. And the bread is crushed, I'll have to buy some more.

Nihil cannot find the words to soothes her, so she soothes herself. With deep breathes that shudder on the uptake.

She never calls me love, Nihil realized, unless she was sure she would never be able to say it again.

 

At the hospital, where Nihil is old and his subordinates are older, he goes to see her. This time his guards are quite young looking, noticeable to others but discrete enough to keep the nurses from gossiping too hard. The ghouls chattered back at the castle over who was going, but Nihil slipped off with those that were already on the move. She looks wrapped too thick. Too thin in the gauze. And isn't looking at him when he takes the first step inside. But she's here, and his face itches to have her hands on it- to press her delicate fingers into the bone like she could read the veins like braille.

Last year, on her favorite car, Copia blew a tire. On some highway, trying to get a special kind of rat food that only he could know about. Nihil remembers her face flipping to strict instructions when he finally called in, unable to figure out how to change the tire.

 

"He wants to explore the world," he said back then "you can't keep him cooped up forever."

"ah," she replied, "tell me this when he figures out triple A."

 

She always looked lovely when she spoke.

 

 

In the hospital she seemed so tiny, looking up over the gauze at Nihil's hovering form in the doorway with the kind of intensity that made the nurses outside the room flinch. She always hated this, being helpless, even after services she was ready to bolt. Unflinching to everything happening around her, preoccupied with the final destination. Never being willing to see the bodies being embalmed due to "tying up all the loose ends." Moving so quickly no one could see how puffy her eyes became, how much her hand shook. Nihil always ended up draping his robe sleeves over her- let her stare at the embroidery and make comments about how it frayed here or there between shaky breathes. It was all he could do.

Imperator smiles then, looking right as she did when he saw her off, and greets him. Asks after the new tour, the next step, tying up all those loose ends while she's away. He sits and listens because its all he can do.

 

 

In the warm fingers of dawn after they had first met, after all the partying had ceased and blood cleaned, he remembers walking out into the warmth with a new face. Parked over in the drive way was a black Chevy Impala, with a upside down cross hanging from the rear view, shining like it was a spotlight for the second coming, and there she stood. Her hair was down, still a bit wet, and she had her arms crossed. Black dress just the same as before (she later told him she had multiple). It felt strange, just to see her there. Not dramatics, no flares, no sudden encore of dancing girls. Everyone has to go home sometime, he would guess, even the satanists.

 

"Hey stranger," Imperator said. "I'm guessing you need a ride home."

 

"Yeah." Not-yet-papa Nihil responded, "You guys kinda ate my designated driver."

 

Imperator smiled a tiny bit at him.

 

Her now, covered in gauze and not that driveway anymore, tried to chat him up again but he can't keep up and makes her sign in frustration. Can't respond in clever or witty come-backs, his sons always seemed able to respond in a way that made her smile just a tad. Nihil grabs the remote from the table and flips to the horror channel, and the tension dissipates. They run over all the old movies like worry stones, and Imperator points out all the flaws in the depictions of demons, ghouls, The Old One.

 

"you know, the previous one was better." She tells him.

 

 

Their first date, after he insisted and she raised her eyebrows and shyly agreed, was to see a drive-in movie. He watched Satan movies before, but she seemed to know about every obscure movie that even touched on it. Her sitting in the drivers seat, telling him about the french cinema's deception of Satan rituals, was more compromising that he realized. He missed putting popcorn into his mouth a few times while watching her.

 

"And then the old theater up north start showing these B-movies, absolutely terrible by the way, and I used to have to park on the grass in the truck because it was so tiny-"

 

"You had a truck?" He interrupts without meaning too.

 

Imperator is taken aback "Oh, yeah. That was a few years ago. Before I got into the church really." and looks at the big screen out the windshield.

 

"I thought you were, born into it." Nihil replied, unsure where to go from here.

 

"No, not really," She explained with a slight strain, "I was an outsider from the start. I didn't want to become a ghoul. I wanted something else."

 

There was a quiet pause, Sister taped her finger on the cup lid of the Cola in the holder.

 

"The truck was my mom's." she said quietly. "I ended up with it. Left where she was living, slept in it whenever I could. I loved that thing."

 

"Did you ever tell her where you went?" Nihil asked

 

"There was nobody to tell." she lifts the straw to her mouth, not looking at him.

 

 

The horror channel in front of them plays on, and he slowly slips a hand onto the hospital bed. Imperator doesn't look down. He knows she isn't angry (at least he hopes she isn't) but he just can't find the right way to fit back together with her. She walked two steps ahead of him when they met, and it felt like he was on her heels- stepping on the backs of her shoes.

A scream emits from the TV, and they both talk slow and easy, walking the same circles back together again.

 

When he first admitted to being in a new-age band to her, she demanded that he play her music. Gathered all these people, ready your hands for the callus, shred the cloth for bandages. Prepare the rosaries. He played for hours, days, everyone lied on the floor- everyone was suddenly standing- everyone was screaming. Every working part of a sermon received by a hungry house. By a castle awaiting to be built. They made new bodies on the alters and yet found the bombs in conversations. The sons got older, the sons died, now they were left with whatever they could get their hands on. After they had been together for over a year, marking the anniversary of him joining and her climbing the ranks with a large party, and they still took over the dance floor constantly. Every gathering was bookmarked with her standing in the dawn, sliding into the driver seat, and speeding off with him in the passenger. But that morning, as the dawn truly grasped sister's subtle arrays of blonde hair, she gave up the driver seat to him.

 

"I'm a bit tired." she yawned into her hand, "You drive us back." and placed the keys into his hand.

 

He stood there stupid when the passenger side door was opened, she climbed in, shut, and leaned back looking at him.

"I'd imagine you would be more, ecstatic." She spoke from the other end of the window. Nihil hustled into the car after that- and drove them home much slower than her liking.

 

After that, they switched driver constantly. It almost became a game- racing each other to the front seat like teenagers. Chasing around the concrete just to swipe the keys from the other's hands. Every morning they would erupt into shouts over who got to the driver side first. Their black car the only one in the drive way- everyone else had always parked far away from sister, even before Nihil. Just another part of life. Even satanists have to go home.

Nihil once tilted his head back to look at the sky to check if it was to rain on their drive back, her finger grazed his adams apple. He wanted to ask for her palm to press there instead. He did not.

 

There was a softer moment as the movie in front of them ended, while Nihil was still thinking about the past, Imperator spoke up.

"Papa."

 

"Yes?" he replied

 

"We will have to get a new car."

 

"Yes sister." Nihil replied.

 

"But I'll be the only one driving. You're too old" Imperator said matter-of-factually.

 

"Yes sister." he says with a hint of dejection.

 

 

Imperator once unleashed the boxes upon boxes of family photos she kept. One half all church members- dead or alive. The other, faded and wrinkled, of her family line- dead or alive. Nihil kept pulling out the ones where she's ten, twelve, sixteen. All smiling, all kinds of colors, all with short cropped blonde hair. They sat together on the carpet in his room, neatly aligning their shoes next to the door, and she let him see all what preceded them. She kept taking pictures, he remembers in the hospital room, right up till Papa III died. The camera was passed off to someone else, and she walked briskly through the halls once again to make sure the castle kept moving. This startles him, and he turns to look at sister.

 

Imperator feels him looking after a moment. "Yes, Papa?"

 

Nihil pauses to take a breath, "Are you feeling cabin fever since you cannot bolt?"

 

Imperator laughs. "Not with you here. I know I'm going with you after I feel better, someone has to be your designated driver."

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> First of all this is for my friend Craig, LAX airport terminal 63 that gave me a bag of peanuts with a bone in it, and the unrelenting love for people who plain just love each other.


End file.
